Epistemological Resources Research Articles

The future of Black Theology of Liberation: Narrative as epistemological resource

The death of Black Theology of Liberation (BTL) has been announced, and many were invited to the funeral. This article rejects vehemently such a death as a myth, and provides two reasons why such a theology would have a place to address theologising in the world. It firstly argues that BTL attributes its birth through stories. These stories are captured in history; embodied stories that are told. Secondly, it is found in a broader epistemology than that provided by the Enlightenment paradigm. Therefore, it is not only found in conceptual, argumentative discourses, but other forms of knowledge systems, including stories, poetry, and personal storytelling. However, this has still not been equally appreciated and explored. Taking the above two reasons into account, the death of BTL cannot be announced by academics, since they were never the sole custodians thereof, only recipients of the tradition of an oppressed people.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The article has implications for how theology is being done in all theology-related disciplines, moving from context, to scripture, to context in a continuous hermeneutical circle. It addresses the way in which all theological disciplines have been functioning within the Enlightenment paradigm, and how black theology itself has lent itself to it, but is continually reforming, because of its nature to be narrative in its approach.

Why the Turks? On the etymological method in Fredegar's account of the Trojan Franks

This article is part of a larger project that seeks to understand the role of the etymological method in historical writings. I analyse the account of the Trojan origin of the Franks in the Chronicle of Fredegar and demonstrate that Fredegar uses the etymological method as an epistemological resource and a catalyst to the narrative, and that taking this into account sheds light on some of Fredegar's narrative choices. Particularly, the use of the etymological method explains the extraordinary association of the Franks with the Turks, which has long puzzled historians. My conclusions advocate for an inclusive and methodologically careful consideration of etymological stories to understand the internal logic of medieval historical narratives and the methods that shape their messages. My reading suggests that Fredegar's is not a story of ethnic uniqueness but a scholarly account of kinship between the peoples of Eurasia.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE HEART: KAINONIA OF THE UKRAINIAN TRADITION

The research interest is focused on the examination of the kainonia nature of Ukrainian philosophy. It is most deeply revealed within the framework of cordocentrism. As a direction of religious philosophy, cordocentrism most prominently affects epistemological resources and the potential of philosophical knowledge. Cordocentrism reveals itself most fully in the philosophical views of H.Skovoroda. The philosopher successfully combines the Christian tradition with the Ukrainian ethnic identity. Therefore, revealing its potential from the principle of worldview, cordognosia turns into an epistemological platform of philosophical science. This is precisely what is emphasized in the concept of the heart of H.Skovoroda, who examines the fundamental principles of human knowledge of the world.The author focuses on the close connection of the Ukrainian philosophical tradition with the philosophy of Christianity itself. It is this synthesis that becomes an interesting prospect for solving the issue of methodological diversity of modern philosophy (the problem of the methodological crisis). Since it is the cordocentric tradition that lays the foundations of scientific synthesis as a fundamental principle of philosophical knowledge. The latter in the modern epistemological tradition is replaced by analytical research. The practices of “heart synthesis” are aimed at the search for knowledge deeper than logical-evidential epistema or doxa. Thus, in the context of the methodological imperfection of the epistemological problem of modern philosophy, turning to the philosophical heritage of cardocentrism, and directly to the philosophy of the heart of H.Skovoroda, is a promising direction of philosophical knowledge.

JIĀO/JIÀO 教 Chinese bilingual doctoral researchers to theorise translingually: A pedagogy for intercultural doctoral education

The transcultural and translingual diversity of bilingual doctoral researchers who speak languages other than English, in particular those with non-Anglophone backgrounds, has been emphasised in recent years to challenge the monolingual English norm. To explore effective pedagogies to motivate these bilingual doctoral researchers to theorise translingually, this paper draws upon methodologies about translingualism and intercultural doctoral education to dispel the recurrent doubts raised by these bilingual doctoral researchers. Thus, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 Chinese bilingual doctoral researchers and their supervisors in Australia and China to understand their perceptions and practices regarding using the linguistic and epistemological resources buried in Chinese for academic purposes. In response to the concerns expressed by the participants, three critical roles of supervisors are highlighted, namely exemplifying, teaching and demanding translingual theorising. These three roles are further developed into a pedagogical framework inspired by the Chinese word jiāo/jiào 教, which itself is an example of translingual theorising.

Fūdo in Foreign Language Learning in Japan and Finland

While the Japanese education system and policy have been studied extensively, Japanese philosophy and thoughts have rarely served as a theoretical and methodological resource in the field of comparative and international education. Resonating with a current scholarly attempt to explore the possibilities and limitations of using Japan as an epistemic resource, I have experimented with drawing upon Japanese philosophical thinking, namely Watsuji Tetsurō’s (1889-1960) comparative phenomenological study, to analyse the current foreign language education reforms in Japan. In this paper, I tell the story of my thought experiment in which I explore autoethnographically how my epistemic mindset has changed during my PhD journey through a slow dialogue with Watsuji’s study on milieu, relationality and ontological inquiry into human beings. Aiming to multiply the epistemological resources for educational research, I analyse reflexively on the way in which I was destabilised by Japanese philosophy in (un)learning educational practices in Japanese contexts. In so doing, I explore how ‘foreign’ educational comparativists might be able to move beyond the storyteller role in foreign contexts or the expert role in home contexts and, accordingly, contribute to promoting a pluralistic knowledge production.

Försök till transspråkande undervisning

Today many classrooms in Sweden are multilingual, characterized by a diversity of linguistic, cultural and epistemological resources available for teaching and learning. Handling this diversity puts certain demands on teachers in order to provide all students equal learning opportunities in a context where the language of instruction is Swedish. As a response to this, local school development projects based on multilingualism as a resource have been initiated. This study focuses on two such projects with the aim to deepen the knowledge about how translanguaging teaching practices can be developed. To make visible what characterizes as well as enable and constrain translanguaging teaching practices under development, the theory of practice architectures is used. Three different practices are identified The Multilingual, The Ambivalent multilingual and The Monolingual teaching practice. The practices are formed by differing cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. Above all, cultural-discursive arrangements such as norms and ideas affect the differences between the three practices. Existing norms and ideas affect how material and economic resources, mostly identic in all three practices, are used. Furthermore, monolinguistic norms seem to form hierarchical relations. Thus, we argue to develop translanguaging practices multilingual norms are important to develop.

Beliefs versus resources: a tale of two models of epistemology

Compelling evidence, from multiple levels of schooling, suggests that teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about knowledge, knowing, and learning (i.e., epistemologies) play a strong role in shaping their approaches to teaching and learning. Given the importance of epistemologies in science teaching, we as researchers must pay careful attention to how we model them in our work. That is, we must work to explicitly and cogently develop theoretical models of epistemology that account for the learning phenomena we observe in classrooms and other settings. Here, we use interpretation of instructor interview data to explore the constraints and affordances of two models of epistemology common in chemistry and science education scholarship: epistemological beliefs and epistemological resources. Epistemological beliefs are typically assumed to be stable across time and place and to lie somewhere on a continuum from “instructor-centered” (worse) to “student-centered” (better). By contrast, a resources model of epistemology contends that one's view on knowledge and knowing is compiled in-the-moment from small-grain units of cognition called resources. Thus, one's epistemology may change one moment to the next. Further, the resources model explicitly rejects the notion that there is one “best” epistemology, instead positing that different epistemologies are useful in different contexts. Using both epistemological models to infer instructors’ epistemologies from dialogue about their approaches to teaching and learning, we demonstrate that how one models epistemology impacts the kind of analyses possible as well as reasonable implications for supporting instructor learning. Adoption of a beliefs model enables claims about which instructors have “better” or “worse” beliefs and suggests the value of interventions aimed at shifting toward “better” beliefs. By contrast, modeling epistemology as in situ activation of resources enables us to explain observed instability in instructors’ views on knowing and learning, surface and describe potentially productive epistemological resources, and consider instructor learning as refining valuable intuition rather than “fixing” “wrong beliefs”.

Sociology of Vibe: Blackness, Felt Criminality, and Emotional Epistemology

The opacity and mundaneness of racism often allows it to slip through our traditional systems of accounting and measuring. The study of racialized emotions has been an important intervention in sociology to understand the intimate nature of racialized social structures. There still is a need to understand the language Black communities use to communicate their complex emotional worlds and the nuanced ways abusive power systems are felt in everyday life. Using 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in northeast North Carolina and data from 23 in-depth interviews, the author examines the relationship between Black people’s emotional habitus and racial structures. The results indicate that Black people developed vibe as a rhetorical tool to articulate their complex emotional economy and it is regularly used to make sense of racialize experiences. Vibe is not limited to racial understanding as it works to name the often unsayable and perceptive ways people know, feel, and respond to the opacity and non-quantifiable dimensions of social experience. This paper focuses on the ways Black community members used vibe to articulate feeling the criminalization of Blackness or what this research refers to as ‘felt criminality.’ Despite facing emotional subjugation Black community members were still invested in emotive projects and used their felt experience as an epistemological resource to make sense of racial processes in a supposedly colorblind society.

Preservice science teachers’ epistemological framing in their early teaching

ABSTRACT Background In the context of recent research in science education and continued struggles to understand how best to support science teachers, epistemological frames, made up of sets of epistemological resources teachers activate, have emerged as an important focus of research. However, at the time of this writing no research was available to identify the epistemological frames activated by preservice science teachers (PSTs). Methods In this research, using qualitative research methods, we studied and applied a coding scheme to identify 10 PSTs’ epistemological framing in their early teaching as part of a science teaching methods course. Three observations and three interviews of each PST served as primary data sources. Findings We found three main epistemological frames activated. Further, we identified the contexts in which these frames were activated, where contexts can be understood as situations characterized by different possible dimensions within which resources are activated. We also described dynamics noted by PSTs related to the activation of specific epistemological resources and identified frames. Contribution This research is a relatively new application of the epistemological framing framework that has potential to help science teacher educators better understand and support PST learning and practice.

Epistemological process towards decolonial praxis and epistemic inequality of an international student

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the epistemic inequality of international students as a “new” inequality that is under-represented in the current debates about decolonisation (albeit shaped by colonial discourses depicting international students as in deficit and incapable of meeting the standards of (colonial) universities). In this theoretical context, the paper reflects on a multi-modal digital methodology used in a research project that aimed to understand how international students deploy their epistemological resources to learn the curriculum. The paper describes selected artefacts submitted by the students around which their epistemic frames were expressed, suggesting where these may be concealed by epistemological situatedness of the lecturers. Based on the analysis of these artefacts, the paper develops and interrogates an epistemology for support towards interrogating the role of our own epistemological binaries in adversely affecting students’ epistemic frames in the curriculum. As such, it contributes to a gap in the literature around decolonial pedagogy, and its role in tackling educational inequalities.

Myth as a manifestation of the functional asymmetry of the human

The subject of the article is the problem of the functioning of myth in the context of a dialectically constructed functional asymmetry of culture, language and thinking, where myth and science actively interact complementing each other. The purpose of the article is to consider the causes, nature and mechanism of this interaction, to identify the features of its manifestation and to show its positive sides. As a methodological support for the research, approaches and principles of non-classical science were used, allowing to move away from the classical attitudes of mythology and look at it more broadly, considering the myth not as a legend about gods and heroes, but as a cultural universal and a property of consciousness. The main conclusions of the article are reduced to understanding the importance of the perception of myth in the mode of non-classical mythology developed in the twentieth century, where myth is understood as a semantic matrix of culture responsible for the formation of a field of value meanings. This makes it possible to better understand the role of myth and myth-making in the structure of culture and consciousness, as well as to consider the epistemological resource of myth in scientific creativity, which is clearly underestimated in science, creating a complex system of cognitive dependencies resembling the interaction of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, which form the necessary variety of functional capabilities of human intelligence, working on the principle of mutual complementarity.

Epistemic justice in public involvement and engagement: Creating conditions for impact.

IntroductionPatient and public involvement in research is anchored in moral and epistemological rationales. Moral rationales relate to the public having a right to influence how knowledge about them is generated. Epistemological rationales relate to how research design and implementation can improve when informed by experiential, as well as technical, knowledge. In other words, public involvement can increase the epistemological resources of researchers, and contribute to research that is fit for purpose and has high external validity.MethodsThis article presents an analysis of 3 meetings and 11 interviews with public collaborators and researchers in three UK‐based health research studies. Data comprised transcripts of audio‐recorded research meetings and interviews with public collaborators and researchers. Data were first analysed to develop a data‐informed definition of experiential knowledge, then thematically to investigate how this experiential knowledge was considered and received within the research space.ResultsAt meetings, public collaborators shared their experiential knowledge as stories, comments, questions, answers and when referring to their own roles. They were aware of crossing a boundary from everyday life, and some adapted their contributions to fit within the research space. Although researchers and public collaborators made efforts to create an inclusive climate, obstacles to impact were identified.ConclusionsConsidering experiential knowledge as a boundary object highlights that this knowledge has a different form to other kinds of knowledge that contribute to research. To enable impact from experiential knowledge, researchers need to create a space where public collaborators experience epistemic justice.Patient and Public ContributionThe Peninsula Public Engagement Group (PenPEG) was involved in the planning and conceptualization of the study, including the development of the ethics application and the interview schedules. One member of this group (Richard Fitzgerald) and one from outside the group (Leon Farmer), were full members of the author team and were involved in the data analysis. Leon Farmer has since become a member of PenPEG. Richard Fitzgerald and Leon Farmer were not involved in the three research studies sampled for this study. Sadly Richard Fitzgerald died during the course of this study.

Neuroaesthetics of Visual Invention: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal in The Beautiful Brain

Scholars study how the visual and the verbal intersect in scientific texts that incorporate images, but rarely are artistic renderings considered central to scientific epistemologies. This article turns to neuroaesthetics to understand the productive role of art in scientific visual invention. As shown through the drawings of neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the neuroaesthetics of visual invention explain how art may offer scientists the epistemological resources needed to see around hegemonic paradigms in their disciplines.

Pre-service Physics Teachers’ Beliefs about Learning Physics and Their Learning Achievement in Physics

Abstract This study investigates pre-service teachers’ beliefs about learning physics and explores how beliefs correlate with learning achievement as evidenced by conceptual understanding and grades in a year-long physics course. To investigate beliefs about learning physics, 14 second-year pre-service teachers in a teacher training program in South Korea completed a Likert-style questionnaire called the Beliefs About Learning Physics Survey (BAPS). To measure learning achievement, final grades for the physic course were obtained and the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) was used to assess conceptual understanding. Analysis revealed that pre-service physics teachers’ beliefs about learning physics had a positive correlation with conceptual understanding but not with motivational beliefs. Students’ grades in physics had a positive correlation with cognitive beliefs, regardless of changes in pre- and post-test responses. Implications about how to utilize pre-service physics teachers’ beliefs about learning physics as an epistemological resource for teaching and learning physics are discussed.

Queer (af)filiations: Houria Bouteldja and decolonial feminism

This article analyses Houria Bouteldja’s conceptualisation of decolonial feminism as a product of the queer (af)filiations between past and present socio-cultural, linguistic, and epistemological resources and as productive of dynamic, but also strained, transactions across generations, epistemologies, and material realities traversing a variety of local and global geographies. This analysis is framed in reference to specific social, cultural, political, sexual, and linguistic anxieties that inform the socio-political stances adopted in Houria Bouteldja’s ideological investments in the decolonial generally and in decolonial feminism specifically. Finally, the article will propose the notion of queer (af)filiations as a productive interface through which to articulate a socio-political project inclusive of all decolonial members of the postcolonial situation and a more nuanced understanding of translocal and global (af)filiations within decolonialité.

Recontextualising race, politics and inequality in transnational knowledge circulation: Biographical resignifications

This article examines shifts in the meaning and relevance of institutionalised knowledge about social inequalities as it circulates globally. In so doing, it contributes to research critiquing an unequal geopolitics of knowledge that grants greatest authority to theories produced in the global north (Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003). I discuss the resignification of globally circulating texts in terms of their entextualisation and reflect on my own role in this process through an auto-ethnographic narrative. I focus on two widely circulating texts that explicitly deal with questions of social power and globalisation: ‘On the cunning of imperialist reason’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999) and ‘A pedagogy of multiliteracies’ (The New London Group, 1996). Examination of their re-entextualisation in Brazil points to the need to bring to bear additional epistemological resources attuned to social and political struggles in order to address the racial inequalities that have come to be at the forefront of my own scholarly concerns. The article concludes by suggesting ways of engaging with globally circulating knowledge through the incorporation of knowledge produced by local struggles and emerging from everyday categories, giving the example of possible uses of the Brazilian concept of gambiarra.

Art-Science Collaboration in an EPSRC/BBSRC-Funded Synthetic Biology UK Research Centre

Here I examine the potential for art-science collaborations to be the basis for deliberative discussions on research agendas and direction. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a science policy goal in synthetic biology and several other high-profile areas of scientific research. While art-science collaborations offer the potential to engage both publics and scientists and thus possess the potential to facilitate the desired “mutual responsiveness” (René von Schomberg) between researchers, institutional actors, publics and various stakeholders, there are potential challenges in effectively implementing collaborations as well as dangers in potentially instrumentalizing artistic work for science policy or innovation agendas when power differentials in collaborations remain unacknowledged. Art-science collaborations can be thought of as processes of exchange which require acknowledgement of and attention to artistic agendas (how can science be a conceptual and material resource for new aesthetics work) as well as identification of and attention to aesthetic dimensions of scientific research (how are aesthetics and affective framings a part of a specific epistemological resource for scientific research). I suggest the advantage of specifically identifying public engagement/science communication as a distinct aspect of such projects so that aesthetic, scientific or social science/philosophical research agendas are not subsumed to the assumption that the primary or only value of art-science collaborations is as a form of public engagement or science communication to mediate biological research community public relations. Likewise, there may be potential benefits of acknowledging an art-science-RRI triangle as stepping stone to a more reflexive research agenda within the STS/science communication/science policy community. Using BrisSynBio, an EPSRC/BBSRC-funded research centre in synthetic biology, I will discuss the framing for art-science collaborations and practical implementation and make remarks on what happened there. The empirical evidence reviewed here supports the model I propose but additionally, points to the need to broaden the conception of and possible purposes, or motivations for art, for example, in the case of cross-sectoral collaboration with community engaged art.

Features of application of fundamental knowledge in innovative space: ontological aspect

The analysis of the innovative space with a complex structure and configuration has been conducted by showing that its space-time frame is uncertain due to the high dynamics. The results obtained from the analysis of virtuum as a kind of multidimensional reality, forming a new image of society and, at the same time, generating and combining new knowledge. Knowledge and innovation are shown as the fundamental dominant of the current model of society and as the result this model combines the characteristics of informational, cybercultural, technogenic, virtual, and innovative society. On this basis, the main purpose of the research was implementation of the correlation of innovative creations and new epistemes, which were the foundation of the innovative space. The ontological approach that became the theoretical basis of this research showed that the innovative space is understood as one of the multidimensional sphere of social existence as such, including all actors of innovation. The results of the research confirmed that fundamental knowledge is updating the epistemological resource, at the same time, the mechanisms and methodology of research are constantly changing, technical and technological tools are being modernized and all of these factors influence on innovative space. Besides, innovative space as an artificial environment is correcting social and natural phenomena.

Collaborative Archaeology as Heritage Process

The archaeology of Amache, the site of a WWII-era Japanese American incarceration camp, has been performed collaboratively with survivors, their families, and local residents for over a decade. This makes it an exemplary test case for how research intertwined with multiple communities can recast our discipline’s relationship to heritage. Project success has been greatly enhanced though creating opportunities for intergenerational and intercommunity engagement with the site and others who care about it. Paying equal attention to process and product allows archaeology to be positively integrated into heritage building and brings epistemological resources to the study of the past.

Queer Phenomenology in Law: A Critical Theory of Orientation

This Article argues for the application of phenomenology to legal understanding, specifically as a way to think about and through queer people’s interactions with law as well as queer theory in law. There are both pragmatic and theoretical justifications for this project. The pragmatic justifications include the need to better address the legal issues and experiences of queer people, recent political and legal decisions and debates that affect queer people specifically, the need to better provide epistemological resources for queer lawyers, law scholars, law students, and their allies, and the need to better understand how law affects minoritarian populations regardless of specific identity characteristics. The theoretical justifications include the relative under-theorization of queer theory in law, the improvement of legal theory’s interaction with related theories in the humanities and social sciences, and the development of a more robust theory of everyday interactions with law consistent with individuals’ diverse experiences and identities. These justifications counsel for further study and attempts to account for diversity in law.